


Cordyceps

by thinskinnedcalciumsipper



Category: Gravity Falls
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-19
Updated: 2016-06-19
Packaged: 2018-07-15 23:03:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7242412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thinskinnedcalciumsipper/pseuds/thinskinnedcalciumsipper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>the canon ending exhausted me but i read potential for sonething more suitable in it so i wrote this trapped on an island in washington with no wifi like a month ago and i dont expect to improve it any more so here it is!!! some fun nothing stuff</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cordyceps

**Author's Note:**

> pls be my buddy and report spelling and grammatical errors ios spellcheck is kind of funny

A girl is in your arms -- in seawater and blond hourglass sand pouring from your praying hands you can almost grasp a mystery of a womans dark hair, gold chain, smoke, hunger, a man harming you, a house, the dead, two children -- shattered, scattered memory boils up from you into vapors in an instant, leaving a crust of dim diluted salts, a sensation of vacance and a devastating weariness and you see a girl -- a little girl -- a brunette child with peachish cheeks sits on your knee, boldly cups your jaw, cries at you.

Vertigo strikes you as powerfully as though you've been dropped into your skin from heaven -- you are aware suddenly, intensely of many too events, the catastrophic clamor of the world (balmy green, too warm, too bright, blinded, your mouth full of static and ozone, companionable pain in your knees, your back, your neck, pains possess you, little bird alighting on a strange headstone, pale air in pine, zephyr of cloverfall, assembled witnesses dumb with wonder) you are abruptly sick and you want to vomit and sleep and flee and sit still and silently feel sad but you find you are enormously moved by the tiny insistent tears of this squeaking thing, this sorry, small girl who cleaves to you like she loves you -- so setting aside with effort your sickness you meet her minuscule grasping hands in yours (broad, calloused, masculine, you note with tepid disinterest) and say kindly to her, "hi, kiddo -- what's your name?"

Poor child, poor child, how she cries and cries and cries. Your careful embrace she accepts though a tempest consumes her -- her tears saturate the collar of the peculiar coat you realize you are wearing -- it is warm, and it is gloriously green -- and there are more, witnesses gathered in the sea-glen of quieted pine, sage and acolyte, uncannily similar faces rigid with sorrow -- he approaches you, a narrow fair old man, timidly, timorously, a tenebrous infection of blue melancholy in the fresh treelight, and as little ones in his sobering gray wake clutch each other in passionate unhappiness a sorry old man collapses before you, throws his arms around you, rolls his cheek over your placid brow, clasps your head urgently to breast, gathering you to him like an infant, like a crying little girl, sobs breathlessly at you you are his hero. You are bleary and blurred and uncomfortably warm.

In time, you are ushered up -- it hurts you to stand, it hurts -- people speak, but it is hard to hear, hard to know -- to yield to their doleful, gentle urging is much better --considerately, that pretty little girl tugs the peculiar long coat off you so you are not quite suffering from heat. She dithers with you holding the hem of the thinned red sweater you wear with touching urgency. You actually can't recall ever seeing a child before. Her hair is long and curly. She is very small. You think you could hold her in your fist.

She has a brother -- twins, you observe with a smile -- that dotingly toddles after her, meticulously avoiding your eye. You suppose he is shy. The wood is warm and green and deep and good, you think. The strangers know the way to where they want you. The little girl attached to you is pretty and sweet. Affectionately you nudge her cheek and her feeling when she looks up at you you could never guess -- it is shimmering with reflections of forest and a foreign effervescence and an old man follows you a while behind -- sunshine bright in the lenses of his spectacles hiding his eyes -- perhaps he thinks you don't remember he is there. He never speaks.

They show you, all the speaking people show to you a feminine hip of pale hill protruding from the pine wood. They show you a ruin of a house, blessedly cool in its mossy demolished interior, ferns unfurling underfoot, speckles of spectral debris, an eviscerated television set where minute moons are blooming. They show you in a crushed wet room in a cracked and clover-eaten mirror an old man they explain is you -- gently, so as not to offend them, you laugh -- you think, feeling in the dark, you are young, though you are very old.

An old man holds you. He is very sad. In the mirror, he appears twice.

You expect to vomit but you do not. There are growing things, disorder in you. You flow though you sit perfectly still. You drink a lot of water and look a long time at your folded human hands. You think about pines.

The pretty girl climbs into your lap, leans her puckered temple trustingly on you -- you realize with mild surprise you've been arranged in an armchair (damp and fragrant, soaked with wilderness and a flight of white fungus, illuminated by a column of restless light in a flowered dark like the secret insides of trees where insects grow) and the pretty little girl (Maple, she tells you, Maple Pines, you guess she is teasing you so you indulgently grin) the pretty and pitiful girl with her petite plump arms lovingly woven around your neck (Europa and complacent bull wearing wreathes of lilies and lichens) tells you a story of her lineage, she tells you her fathers father had twin brothers, she tells you she had an uncle she devotedly loved and she shows you images (glossy cellophane facsimile and sticky crayon scrawl) of a tall, broad, brutal man, an old man asleep, an old man screaming, a splayed man in a loud floral shirt, a man smugly displaying a fan of playing cards, a man tall broad and brutal with desperately unhappy eyes, a man holding tight a happy child as you hold Maple Pines.

Another child is there, who sits folded up at your feet contemplatively frowning, who warily, wearily, gradually and gravely leans his little head on your knee and there phases into a thin weak sleep, and simpers when you sooth his tumbled hair, and Maple Pines sighs, and an old man meandering around you all will not look at you. You are very tired.

Mercifully, you sleep. You leave a long time. You dream nothing but insatiable envy. You are aware only vaguely of being disturbed, of uproarious revolutions of activity you placidly shine in the axel of, of being fed and watered in a long night, of being begged to return.

And when you wake, as if she'd never left, as if she resided there (poor little lonely little child) loyal Maple Pines is cuddled still in the crook your arm.

"I don't want to go," she pleas, seeing you stir. "Let me stay."

What can you say? You ruffle her hair consolingly but she will not be consoled. She does not cry, no more, never again, but she looks too old, much too old to be contained to her maidenly diminutive dimensions. She leans her silken infant cheek on yours and sighs.

They leave, the unhappy little children, that day in the soft liquid string ascent that stuns the dozing wood before noon -- you are dressed in a sweater that little one, the kind little girl, Mabel (not Maple) had prepared and guided by hand up a deerway cutting the hummock the house stands in to something almost familiar, an empty bus port -- she is held by you, Mabel, hugged like a doll until she is taken by the man Stanford and she protests only with a long look, that tragic look of a girl beginning to become something mortal and stained, and grasps your hand until your hold is broken. Her withering timid twin dithers around you as if he'd like to hug you but elects in the end only to shut away and lean hard on his solemn sister.

You watch obscured through prisms of dust and greasy glass and awful clamoring sprites of bright light Mabels colorful childish scuttle to the last seat of the groaning vehicle where she sits backward to stare at you. Unsmiling, obscured and shrinking, she shows you her opened hand.

You watch her until she is gone, Mabel, not Mapel, and you realize then, brutally abruptly, you miss her very much. It hurts you.

You guess you are carried back to the house. You experience digits of pointless input -- the parlor door, the intense pale of fresh paint, an odor underneath, something stinking, record player, television set, drawn curtains, quiet, firmament of dusty dark, in a monasterial tall hall an overturned teeny tiny trainer with bubblegum pink laces like bramble unwoven and woeful -- "I would like you to eat," says the Stanford-man whom you think you dislike, putting you in that old chair, and it isn't a request.

He returns to you in time, tries to insist on your attention, but you are gone, elevated, evaporated, you are diamonds of light infested by irresolute cherubs of aeroplankton, you are vacant orbits in a rock sarcophagus of prehistoric serpent, you are the crystal dragonling in a vat of murky brine which watches an old man try to feed his reflection a dripping gruel -- pliant, placid, pallid Hypnos over which a darkly brother fretted fervidly -- his expression puckered and unpleasant though his voice is made patient and kind.

There was a little girl that was kind to you, you almost remember -- there was wood, and noise, and another child, a counterpart, with whom you'd argued, a male little twin a time ago you hated -- you almost remember, almost, almost, almost remember -- there is dark sticky sugar stirred in the vague slurry of milken oats, added to entice you to eat, and this kindness makes you smile, and an old man you watch returns it with visible relief. He wipes your mouth. His rough lips you feel impress the damp surface of your forehead.

"Thank you," the old man tells you, though you can't guess why. You really want to sleep. Something hurts.

You live a little more. You sleep very much. You never dream in stories, only scattered patterns, angelic geometries, symbology, urgent longing -- sometimes, a little girls clever little hands -- once, a little boy that shut his eyes.

You are aware of a sunset, large and luridly orange, uncomfortable warmth, something insisted into your hand. You are aware of the gray sensation of food, the sweet heat of a bitter drink fed to you. Spectacles of staggered sound are arranged around you until they are shut off. There is a sound you realize in a while is insect cries and birdsong, the sough of lofty air in pine canopy. There is an asylum of quiet. There is night. There is pain. There is always pain.

"I'm so sorry, Stanley," he is saying, "I'm so sorry," -- this doesn't disturb you, he says this all the time, the unhappy old man -- he pours water from a tin dish into your head, pushes away your clean wet hair from your face which he soothes with his long hands, leans on the tub lip to look inscrutably at you a while and stands. He leaves.

You are illuminated -- there are orbiting haloes of sunshine in water turning around you and a spray of dew on remote teal tiles, which are difficult to see -- you are clear, suddenly, filling your skin -- a mans hands resting on your knees you see you can turn and close -- your back and buttock clasped to porcelain shell know only a speculative specter of pain, an estimation of pain, so you guess you have had drugs -- you can't remember -- it's very hard to remember much at all. There is light and water and a comfortable calm. It occurs to you you have been struggling --suffering -- and it has ceased. You smile. You make sound.

"Stanley?" a man asks you -- you see vaguely the six fingered man, standing in the severed dark of the doorframe -- it is unbearably light where rosy sunbright ignites the lenses of his spectacles and you cannot detect his eyes.

"What were you singing, Stanley?" he says.

You don't know what he means, so you only smile at him.

"What was that?," he repeats, "What was that? Were you singing? What were you singing?" His approach is very quick. It makes you uncomfortable.

His long broad hand -- both hands -- close around your throat.

"What were you singing, Stanley?" he asks you -- his voice is falling feathers and silver dust, he sounds very young -- he gasps, he is begging, "what were you singing, Stanley?"

He crushes shut your larynx. It looks a little lighter. Something is filling. You croon in amazement, you are forced down, you are slipping -- you see the six-fingered man through the warping veil of water which passes over you -- you are smiling -- you recall suddenly, vividly, you once burned to death -- the gloss of water like pale fire, your shroud overcoming you -- the six-fingered man, who is weeping, pleads with you for something, something, his fists your distended eyes sit in, warm water in your mouth when you laugh -- his amazing unhappiness, his knees in your tender naked stomach and his whole weight on your neck -- you laugh because you remember, you remember -- you remember everything -- and you know him -- beatifically, with meaningless frenzy igniting your temporary soil-blood and Stanfords pointless tears anointing you you laugh, because you know him -- you know him! and you know you'll meet again some sunny day.


End file.
